


Black Mountain, NC / Grand Canyon, AZ

by Charlie Snow (Algedonic)



Series: Like Pins In A Map [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-30
Updated: 2013-07-30
Packaged: 2017-12-21 22:17:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 634
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/905580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Algedonic/pseuds/Charlie%20Snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's just a thing they do, leave behind this little piece of themselves, on trees and in the stalls of rest-stop bathrooms, big places and little places and places that don't mean anything to anyone but them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Black Mountain, NC / Grand Canyon, AZ

There’s a tree in the back yard of a house in Black Mountain North Carolina where Sam and Dean lived for 2 months in the summer of 1997. A little girl lives there now, with her mom and dad and tiny little baby brother. On nice days she takes her Lisa Frank backpack full of barbie dolls out and sits under that tree and acts out picnics and long walks and quiet talks in the front seat of the car and all sorts of other things that people do when they love each other very much. 

She never much liked the names Barbie and Ken, thinks they’re boring and don’t fit with the people in her mind, so she calls them Susie and Damian Wilson, after the initials carved into the bark, makes up stories about their lives. 

She thinks two people would have to love each other a lot to carve their initials into a tree together, that they must want everyone to know, must want the world to remember how much they love each other forever, so she does. She remembers for them.

-

They leave pieces of themselves everywhere, write their names all over the vast empty canvas of America. 

They chip it into the blue paint of truck stop bathroom stalls, write it on sidewalks with abandoned chalk, etch it into rocks on beaches and carve it into trees, so many trees, trees in parks and forests and back yards in so many states they don’t even remember them all anymore. They leave it on graffiti walls and in guestbooks at roadside attractions, carve it into motel chair legs and headboards. They write it out with sticks in the sand, etch it into yellow plastic playground slides, scrawl it in sharpie on doorjambs in alleys.

S.W.

D.W.

Hundreds of places, public places and private places and out-of-the-way places, moments and memories scattered along highways, in rest stops, through cities and towns.

They leave their initials like pins in a map; S.W. D.W. 

Hundreds of places, hundreds of eyes, hundreds of people who for one second of their life remembered, witnessed, wondered about these two people who loved each other so much they wanted _strangers_ to know.

-

Years later that little girl with the barbies goes on a road trip with her family before she leaves for college. They rent an RV, go see the French Quarter in New Orleans, walk the boardwalk in San Antonio, spend the day in the caves in New Mexico.

They’re hiking the Grand Canyon, nearing the end of their trip, when they stop for lunch in the shade at the base of a steep wall of rock. They Canyon rolls out in front of them, painted red and orange and yellow in the afternoon sunlight and it’s stunning, absolutely overwhelming and breathtaking and _beautiful_. She feels small in the face of the overwhelming _vastness_ spreading out for miles and miles in every direction, but also peaceful. Steady.

She takes a bite of her peanut butter sandwich, too distracted with the scenery to follow the conversation. She looks up, moment of strange reverse-vertigo as her eyes trail down the cliff face from the point where it kisses the bright blue sky all the way down and down until-

S.W.

D.W.

She freezes, half-chewed bite of sandwich in her mouth, traces the letters with her fingers, memories upon memories of afternoons under the branches of the tree in her back yard back home, the initials carved there like a brand. 

She doesn’t know if it’s the same people, thinks it’s a _hell_ of a coincidence either way, but she remembers, thinks that two people would have to love each other a lot to carve their names into a canyon wall, and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be it, beginning middle and end, just a quick little one-shot about Winchesters carving their initials into things, about something tangible, _physical_ , in a life that doesn't really leave much room for those kinds of things. But then things happened and after a few really good conversations I was convinced there was more to the story, and this sort of became the intro to a series of one-shots.


End file.
